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You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders,

but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

(Italo Calvino)

The reason why it frequently happens that I read “The Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvi no is because every time I notice some dif ferent details and also because I am fas-cinated by narrations of other cities that did not catch my attention before. Last time I red it I deciced to make a tribute to the book building a new invisible city. I started from two of the elements I was the delighted by in Calvino’s narrations: randomness and transformation.

Randomness because every city in the real world, although it often has its town planning, is made up by single unit that seem to have their own rules. Transformation because cities, as everything in terrestrial life, are subjected to a whole life of changes that modify every single moment of the past and the future.

Therefore I designed a city as a set of cubes two-sides opened, “identical” units arranged in a casual order in the space during the assembly. I also wanted the city to be transportable because it assumed different meanings in different spaces until the death of the city itself. But we all know that the moment of the death is just one of transformation.

All these photos were taken by the photographer Norman Rinaldi in the haunted city of Consonno.

45°47’07’’N 9°23’36’’E

Consonno was a small Italian village like many others in the Alps, at least until the coming of the Count Mario Bagno. Mario Bagno was an entrepre-neur who, during the Italian economic boom, wanted to build a new Las Vegas near the mountains, precisely on the land of Consonno. A piece of the hill, where the village was located on, was literally cut out to achieve his desire of having a panorama on the Lecco lake: in 60’s there was no great attention to environmental safeguard.

In 1968 the village was full of life and enterteinments: it was possible to find restaurants, football and basketball fields, tennis courts, golf courses, iceskating rings, bumper cars, a fun fair and a zoo. The project of a racetrack was only partially realized. The Grand Hotel Plaza with its mock arabesque style and its minaret was the icing on the cake of an ephemeral and kitsch city.

The previous works on the hill made the whole ground precarious and in 1976 a landslide destroyed the main linking road and part of the structures of Consonno. The Count tried to remedy to that situation but from that moment guests reduced considerably and residents began leaving the village.